As Christmas looms on the horizon, most of us are busy with last minute preparations – shopping, wrapping, baking and so on. I managed to get all my presents wrapped Friday night and was feeling quite pleased with myself. Some of the presents I placed under the tree, but since I was too tired to get down on my hands and knees and arrange them all, I left most of them on the couch in the spare room. (The couch is one of those flat surfaces that, in our house, inevitably end up piled high with “stuff”!). Amongst those presents were the ones I had marked “F” for fragrant (and therefore liable to attract canine attention), which I had collected in a large bag for safekeeping. And so, on Saturday morning, feeling I had earned a day out, I set off for the charming shoppes of Port Perry with Amanda and her Mum. We wandered along the main street checking out all the Christmas merchandise and stopped for lunch at the Front Porch (yummy!) before heading home. Meanwhile Gary’s home care nurse had arrived at 11:30 to check on him. He shooed our two Lakeland terriers, Sophie and Danny, into the spare room to get them out from under foot. While the nurse was there, both she and Gary heard squeaking noises down the hall. When she left, Gary opened the door to the spare room to find confetti on the floor. Someone (probably Sophie) had climbed up on the pile of presents on the couch, and grabbed the bag containing the doggy presents. Once their presents were forcibly removed from the bag, the two of them proceeded to unwrap them, with great gusto judging by the mess they made! By the time Gary let them out, Sophie had already chewed the toes from her rubber froggy. He left the toys on the stove for me to peruse but the dogs wouldn’t leave them alone, bouncing up and down to catch a glimpse of their prey. And so I decided to remove them. First I put them on the shelf in my closet. Attending to nature in the ensuite, I heard some strange noises in the bedroom. When I came out, I noticed telltale noseprints on the sliding closet door which had been shoved to one side. Inside the closet, standing on her hind legs in the laundry basket, was Sophie, attempting to climb up the clothes to reach the toys. I actually gave in briefly and let them play with the frogs for a while.But the loud, incessant squeaking drove Gary and I almost mad, so I traded two cookies for two froggies and tried to find a more secure hiding place. I placed the froggies in the closet in the computer room. But once more, the dogs tracked them down. They paced relentlessly in front of the closet (this one has a folding door that they have yet to master!), sniffing the air. Sophie thought perhaps the frogs were behind the computer, so she probed behind the desk with her paws in hopes of snagging one but all she got was a tangle of cables! Outsmarted again, I accepted Jeremy’s offer to rehome the frogs in the workshop downstairs. And so far, the hunt has not resumed, probably because: a) the workshop door is always closed, b) Jeremy was painting in the workshop today and the smell of the paint probably masks the smell of the toys, and c) the workshop is next door to the laundry room where their grooming table is located and they don’t want to risk another brisk brushing today! For now, the traumatized frogs are safe and Sophie and Danny are both officially on the “naughty list”. There will be no surprises for them on Christmas morning! Santa is not amused!